LHB Erector Set

September 18, 2007

Los Angeles’ Rilo Kiley is a significant case in point. Only three full-length albums into their career, they’ve become low-gloss superstars within the rarified world of blogs, music magazines and left-of-the-dial radio, propelled by songs and an understated charisma. On the heels of More Adventurous, their first release distributed by Warner Bros., and a series of festival performances ranging from Glastonbury to Coachella, the band only increased its cachet by scattering to the winds long enough to pursue solo albums and other side projects that seeped deeper into the collective conscious.

Beginning a few years ago with artists such as Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and the band Animal Collective — purveyors of what this era's critics have termed "freak folk" — fans were led on a rediscovery of experimental, pastoral pop music in the Barrett spirit. These musicians cite Barrett as a crucial influence, and in doing so, illustrate how they differ from Barrett himself, for whom copious amounts of LSD became an indispensable and eventually devastating muse. "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" is very much a record of the sacrifice Barrett made, probably unintentionally, for art.

Punkish Portland trio Sleater-Kinney began hitting its stride on 1996's Call The Doctor, but Dig Me Out became the group's defining album. The band formed in 1994 during the riot-grrl era, but gradually used hooky pop melodies to transform the scene's abrasive personal politics into something more sonically palatable. Singer-guitarists Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein created an engrossing interplay, tightened by new drummer Janet Weiss. The first six of the album's 13 songs should've been worldwide hits, from the intense title track through the similarly hard-hitting "Words And Guitar," but there isn't a dud in the bunch. Dig Me Out made such a powerful mark that Sleater-Kinney spent the next decade attempting to live up to it.